


Dreary

by PomegranatePomsom



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Don't tell Toby Fox pls...., Haunting, Headcanon, Marriage, Multi, Not Beta Read, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Pacifist Route, Trauma, headcanon heavy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 02:39:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5113151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PomegranatePomsom/pseuds/PomegranatePomsom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Sans sees things and he breaks. He might as well say why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreary

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone. I hope you like this.  
> It's pretty left-field as far as headcanons go, probably. It's also pretty heavily edited from the original draft.
> 
> Thank you for taking the time to read it!
> 
> This is dedicated to my sweet child Church and Cubert over on Tumblr.
> 
> EDIT ( May 14th, 2016): Thank you all for your kind words and support. YES, I plan to write a sequel! I was in the process of writing it back in February when sadly, my harddrive crashed, taking ALL of my fics with it. Since then, it's been hard to get any writing done. However, I am trying!
> 
> If anyone would like to commission me/commission it, it would certainly motivate me to go faster. (No pressure though, obviously!)

Most days you’re all right. Most of the time, you don’t remember him. You don’t think about the by-gone days of work in the Core, or the cool and tranquil nights at the Capital. You can survive on your routines and take comfort in the bliss of everyday life. It’s easier to do now that you’re on the surface, away from the house where your secrets were locked up, begging to be touched or discovered. It’s easier now that you’re surrounded by people you can talk to.

But some days are not all right. Some days everything floods back, vivid and fresh, as though the whole ordeal had been days ago, not decades. Days like those, you’re absolutely paralyzed. You can’t leave your bed, let alone your home; you can’t stop shaking, hyperventilating to fill lungs that you don’t have. You’ll tremble and you’ll weep and you’ll thrash when a worried Papyrus calls Undyne or Frisk and they put their hands on you.

You won’t hurt them (save for one incident when you knocked out one of Undyne’s teeth; she grew it back in a week), but you will apologize and you’ll brush it off as some little thing—maybe a nightmare, maybe just an “off” day. But Frisk will look you in the eye sockets and you can tell that they _know_.

Someone who doesn’t know, however, is Toriel. She doesn’t know anything about your fits, not even that they happen. At least, you assume she doesn’t. She doesn’t mention it, not when you’re together, when you’re holding hands and thinking about just how much larger her soft fingers are than yours; when you’re curled up reading or watching television; when you’re baking and trying to think up some wordplay on “egg shells”—it never comes up. It’s a relief, honestly. Between raising the now-pubescent Frisk, teaching and community organizing, she has enough on her plate to worry about without adding on an unstable boyfriend.

You would have loved to keep it that way, honestly; it wasn’t an often enough occurrence for it to be important.

That is, until one day when you come to visit. You’d been feeling fine, the weather had been gorgeous. The two of you had been tossing around the idea of a shepherd’s pie for a while, so you had a hunk of brisket tucked comically under your arm, which she snickers at when you arrive. You’d thought it was going to be a normal Saturday. But one minute you’re mixing a bowl of pie dough (exaggerating the effort of it), then you see a flash of blue and orange, and before you know it there’s a mess of broken glass and spilled dough at your feet. You’re quivering like a leaf and there’s tears and even in the middle of this you know Tori is watching and _damn that makes it worse_.

She has you in an instant, scooping you up and taking the both of you away from the kitchen and the broken glass. You take fistfuls of her dress in your pathetic little bony fingers, your eyes darting about frantically. After she sits you down on the couch and kneels in front of you, it dawns on you that you’ve been shrieking this whole time. You manage to stop after she cups your cheekbones, toning it back to a quiet wail.

“Are you all right?” she asks, taking a moment to look you over. “Are you hurt? Did I accidentally burn you somehow?” You shake your head because you can’t talk at all, you can only make this very _animal_ sound.

“What’s wrong, then? What do you need?” You want to tell her that you don’t know, that you never know how to fix this. You reach out to hold her, and a third voice mutters to you; in a panic, you thrust yourself against her, wheezing and clawing at her dress.

It lasts an hour this time—not your longest fit by a longshot, but it’s rough on the both of you. By the time you calm down, you’re so drained you don’t want to move. You manage to muster up enough energy to hobble back to the kitchen with Tori, where the two of you clean up the mess.

“We’ll try again another day,” she consoles you, patting your head. Her tone is as soothing and her touch is as caring as ever, but you’re sure in your mind she thinks you’re some sort of freak. You simply nod at her.

“Should I call Papyrus? Would you feel better at home?” A shake of the head is your reply. Your metaphorical throat is still too tight to form words.

You end up in her lap, your head against her breast, clinging to her like a child as she grades the previous day’s tests. She hums as she marks them, smiling at the papers she gets to place shimmery stars on, and drawing her brows together at the ones full of little red marks. Part way through, she stops, smiles at you, kisses your head.

Usually, you hate to be touched when you’re coming down; you’re hypersensitive, and every bit of contact feels alien. Knowing this, you naturally flinch when her lips press against your skull. To your relief, you don’t actually feel anything.

“Tori?” you mutter after a time, voice cracking.

“Yes?” she replies. She stays focused on her work, not bringing any attention to your newly recovered ability to talk.

“I’m sorry, for—“ you roll your wrist in an encompassing gesture—“for all this.”

“Don’t be. There was no harm done. I’m just worried about you.” You can see her expression shift to concern. “Has this happened before, Sans?”

You shrug and, as much as you don’t want to, try to laugh it off. “Yeah, a few times.”

“Have you told anyone about this?”

You take a moment to choose your words. “People know about it.”

“Does a _doctor_ know?”

“A doc—I don’t need to see a doctor, Tori! It’s not anything serious.” You grin. “They’ll say something’s wrong with my head and I’ll have to give them a piece of my _mind_!”

She’s not laughing. You don’t blame her-- that was pretty flat. “Well, it looked _very_ serious from my side.”

The two of you go quiet again for a long time. Embarrassment and regret and the desire to be honest well up in your gut. You should tell her, because you want her to know, because you hope that maybe she of all people won’t think you’re batty. But gods, you’re scared. “Can I tell you somethin’?”

“Of course you can. What is it?”

“It’s a- umm, it’s a story. But it’s also a secret.”

“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.”

“Thanks. Thank you. Uhh-“. You clear your throat. Best to get it all out—rip it off like a bandage. “All right, so-“

 

* * *

 

 

_Once upon a time, there was a monster. He was a pretty average guy, for the most part. He had a good job working at a Core lab, was surrounded by good colleagues and had a few good friends. His life, maybe it wasn’t incredibly exciting—but it wasn’t a bad life to have. He felt happy and stable, like he was important._

_One day something magical happens. He’s out to lunch with some of the other boys from his department when the Royal Scientist waltzes right over and sits with them. Wing-Ding Aster is his name, and he’s absolutely brilliant. Just saying that he’d created the Core was oversimplifying it; to really understand the genius of it, you would have to be in the thick of it all the time. Otherwise it’s hard to explain._

_But anyway, as soon as he takes his seat, he turns to the average monster and he smiles. Gaster’s mouth is slightly lopsided when it’s open, and his eyes droop a little, but he’s a good-looking man, especially when he’s like that._

_“There isn’t too many people like us here. I saw you and had to speak with you,” Gaster comments, with his amazingly thick accent. He’s right, too. Most of the folks like them lived out more east, far beyond the Capital. It turned out that both the guy and Gaster had family out there, in the same city, but for now that’s not important._

_Gaster, he decides to keep joining them for lunch. Every day that he’s not busy during their break he’ll invite himself and tag along. Most of the guy’s friends, they’re sort of bothered by him; they think he’s rude or a creep, or both. But the guy himself doesn’t mind. He likes Gaster, and he likes him a lot._

_A couple of years go by, and nothing really changes. Life is still the same, still good, but it’s livelier now. The two of them are spending more time together each day, and every day with Gaster is an adventure. He’s a wild spirit, really unpredictable. One day, as if to prove this, he asks the guy out to dinner, seemingly out of the blue. Not—not just two co-workers going to discuss some reports over a bite. No, no, he wants to go on a date._

_The guy, he says yes almost immediately. After he goes home that day, he realizes that he’d been waiting for it to happen, and he gets just a little excited. He’s nervous, since he hasn’t gone on a date in goodness-knows-how-long, but he honestly couldn’t wait._

_The date goes amazingly. It’s really romantic—you know, the candle-lit dinner in a nice place, with five-course meals and live musicians. It’s the kind of restaurant that you can only get a table at if you call months in advance or you know somebody. It would have been overwhelming if the guy had gone with anybody else, but the conversation is so free and natural that he doesn’t have time to notice anything else._

_The date goes so well that they plan another, and another, and another, and another, until one day the guy wakes up and the two of them are living together. The guy, who had always been kind of a loner despite all the friends he made so easily, was now sleeping in and waking up to a full bed every day. He loved it—he loved being together, doing things together, eating and running and laughing and reading together. He loved Gaster._

_With that kind of love, getting married was honestly the most logical course of action. So in the quiet dark of their apartment, the guy proposes. “Of course! Of course!” Gaster shouts, lifting the guy high into the air and wrapping him up in a bear hug. It’s a bit hard to tell, but the guy can see Gaster’s beautiful glowing eyes start to mist up, and he knows that this is the first time he’s seen the man cry. It makes him feel so much closer to him._

_They have a happy marriage. Nothing goes south or anything like that. They’re kind to each other, respectfully of one another’s intelligence and bounds. They have their own spaces in their home, and, combining this with work, they sometimes spend whole days away from each other. It’s pretty nice; keeps them from getting sick of each other._

_A few weeks short of their tenth anniversary, Gaster pulls the guy in close, and he says he wants a baby. The guy, he’s thrilled! But he’s not looking forward to the actual process of it._

_I’m not sure how most monsters have their kids, exactly. The processes are probably really straight-forward. But for men like Gaster and his husband, it was more complicated. There are a lot of steps involved; they needed soil and jars and blessings, alongside the parts of their souls. It’s just a messy operation all around. Eventually, they get everything together and they put together a little plot where they “plant” their child._

_It’s a waiting game after that. They spend a couple of months preparing, laughing, joking and musing—talking, talking, talking about their kid._

_“We still haven’t picked a name.” The guy says, mere days before they’re going to dig up their child._

_“Have any piqued your interest?”_

_“Not really. I know we talked about Berlin or Tempus, or even Lucida…” The guy, he doesn’t seem impressed at all. “But those are all so stiff. Our kiddo isn’t going to have its nose turned up all the time--.”_

_“I certainly hope not. It won’t even have one!” Gaster had set a hand on his cheek, which was what he always did when he was concerned. Suddenly, though, he has an idea!_

_“What if we named the child after my great uncle?” Gaster’s practically beaming at the idea._

_“The one from the army?”_

_“Yes! The one they say killed a hundred humans in the war, and brought a Soul straight to the king.”_

_The guy, he thinks about it for a minute. He imagines their child living up to its namesake, becoming glorious and celebrated and returning the dignity of all monsters. How could he disagree with that?_

_On the day their child is supposed to be born, they dig out the ceramic pot and very, very carefully—they smash it, together. Inside is this little thing. This tiny- this tiny skeleton, curled up and sleeping in a fire’s ashes and dirt. It isn’t even bothered by all the sounds or the sudden lights. It doesn’t care about being picked up and wrapped up tight; it just sleeps the whole time._

_They’re a full family now. They’re so happy, especially the guy, who’s never felt more cared about in his life. He’d always been kind of alone growing up, so he never really thought he’d have something like this. As a kid, he never thought he’d be as **grounded** as he is now. He just- he loves it. He loves his life and his husband and their baby. _

_But things never do stay happy, of course._

_When the kid is nearly school-age, he gets sick. Nothing too serious, but he still needs to be looked after. Not wanting to dump a sick kid on a sitter, the guy, he decides to stay home while Gaster goes off to work alone._

_Things, they seem to be going okay on both ends. Kiddo’s getting his rest; the guy can catch up on some old work he’d fallen behind on. Gaster calls during his break to check up on him. The men have a good, short conversation. Everything feels like it’ll be all right. But a few hours later, the guy gets another phone call and the head of his department tells him his husband is dead._

_No one seems to know exactly how it happened—no one was watching him, so there are conflicting reports. They all seem to agree that he seemed distracted, though; he was probably thinking about the welfare of his sick child at home and not paying full attention. And then, maybe, he slipped—maybe he was pushed. No matter what happened, a few of his colleagues heard him scream and they watched him tumble down, down, down into the Core. And in an instant, he’s gone._

_They give the guy time off to mourn and to plan the funeral. But he doesn’t plan a service, because there’s no ashes to spread and no family to miss him besides the guy and his son. He also doesn’t grieve; neither of them do. The kid is honestly oblivious to what exactly happened—he keeps asking where his daddy is and the guy isn’t sure how to explain it. And the man himself? Well, he spends the time he’s given in complete shock. He knows his husband is dead, but it hadn’t sunk it._

_It doesn’t until he has to return to work and see where it happened. He stares into the abyss that Gaster fell into and he swore he could feel him. He breaks down and he’s crying and his baby back home is the only thing that keeps him from seriously contemplating jumping in too. The guy, he resigns after that._

_There’s an accident down the road, and the guy, he can’t take it there anymore. So he takes his severance pay and his savings, and he hauls his things away. He decides he’ll move to somewhere where no one knows him, to get away from all the guilt and the obligations he has._

_After a lot of back and forth about the lease to a house, the guy moves to Snowdin. Compared to the noise of the city, it’s practically dead there. It’s nicer; it feels safer. The house is pretty big, and pretty cute, too. It has just enough room for all the guy’s needs, including a shop in the back with good soundproofing and an even better lock._

_You’re probably wondering, “What does this have to do with anything?”. Well, that feeling the guy had when he was last at the Core—that feeling that his husband was still there—it never went away. It followed him out here, miles away. It’s a heavy feeling, like a pressure on his skull and a chill in his bones. It makes it so hard to focus, or breathe, or eat or even walk. Pretty soon, the guy can barely get out of bed._

_That’s when the fits start, honestly. The guy’s dragging himself to bed one night after he’s made dinner, and he lays in his bed in the dark. He closes his eyes for maybe a minute, until he hears a crackling in the air, like static in your clothes. It’s more confusing than scary, honestly. He looks around his room and at the foot of his bed he sees a head, blank and so white he could swear it was glowing._

_Fingers—which are similarly pale—creep up the edge of the guy’s bed and dig themselves into his blanket. The guy is awake by this point, sitting upright again. (He wouldn’t remember it till later, but at that point in time the terrible weight he’d been feeling was gone.) Just as he’s opening his trap to yell, the thing, it changes. The bone almost seems to ripple; it twists up tight until it’s straining, then it rips like flesh and makes this awful, sickening noise._

_When it’s done, there’s holes left in the face: two gaping eye sockets and a lopsided, grinning mouth. It has scars too—above one eye, below the other—as if someone had taken a saw to it. The guy is terrified, so it takes him a moment, but he looks into the pinprick eyes that his intruder has and he recognizes him._

_“Gaster?” he asks, and he immediately regrets it. His whole body seizes up; whatever that thing at the foot of his bed is, it’s on his chest now, its eyes glowing blue and orange. Something thicker than water is dripping out of its mouth, splashing the guy’s face and rolling down his cheeks in fat globs. It seems like its whole body is liquid, and the guy swears he can vaguely see the thing rippling._

_It grabs him by the throat and it pries his jaw open. Then his mouth is flooded, and he’s choking on what honestly felt like hot tar. It floods out of his nostrils and even his eyes. The guy is choking on it and every nerve in him was overloading. His body starts to contort, but not in ways he can control. He ends up in a sorta fetal position, bunched up and smaller than he already is. Then the thing, without a word, just falls on him all at once and swallows the guy up._

_It’s just the most disgusting feeling in the world. Imagine lying in a sewer—now it’s a hundred times worse. It’s burning hot; even the shade of blue that shoots up behind his eyes is searing hot. He’s honestly sure he’s going to die now, if he hadn’t already died and gone to hell. He has so many regrets—ones that, between the pain and the odd shifting in his body, he can’t even reflect on. He wants to pray and apologize, or maybe just plead._

_But he doesn’t get a chance to. He hears a faint knocking in the distance, and the thing that had him trapped is gone as quickly as it appeared._

_There are repeat visits after that. Some are just as awful, most are worse. This goes on for years and aren’t exclusive to bedtime. The guy starts to see the thing everywhere, out of the corner of his eye, always following, always watching. Sometimes it’ll put its hands on him and whisper gibberish in his ears, in the middle of the day, and the guy wonders why the people around him don’t see the thing or help him. He assumes they’re just as scared of it as he is, since it can’t be that they don’t see it. He knows how real it is._

_The guy, he starts losing it. He doesn’t feel safe anywhere and it grates on him. He can’t escape it; all he can do is sleep and shiver and weep. His body starts to react violently to the stress and it takes a metric ton of effort to keep from breaking down in public. He starts to be pretty reclusive after that._

_It got better over the years. The guy, he still sees his husband once in a while, and he still loses it because a dead man touches him or tries to tell him how it feels in the void—but it’s better._

 

* * *

 

 

Between the story itself and the small breaks you had to take to keep from bawling again, it took you a while. But you sigh it out, hugging the arms that are now firmly wrapped around you. You feel good; you’ve been wanting to get that out for the longest time.

“Have you kept this to yourself for this long?” She sounds befuddled.

“Yeah. Who was I supposed to tell?”

“Someone. Anyone at all. Does your brother know about these episodes?”

“Umm, yeah.”

“Then he’ll want to know why they happen. He’s probably worried sick about you.”

You snort out a laugh, not to mock her but to spite yourself. “Nah, he doesn’t really have a clue, I don’t think. I play it down, for his sake.”

“I see.” She says, and the tone of her voice tells you that she won’t be letting this go anytime soon. But she can see how obviously tired you are and decides to be merciful for tonight. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Yeah,” you say, even though you won’t and even though you still feel like you’re on the verge of crying. “I think I’d—like to go home.”

The two of you make a motion towards the phone hanging in the kitchen, but before either of you get a chance to call, Frisk waltzes in, Papyrus tagging at their heels, as if they’d been off-stage, waiting for a cue.

“Brother!” Papyrus calls, his voice loud and sing-song. “I came to get you from your playdate! And I found the human on the way, too!”

You manage a real laugh, lazily striding over to him. “Thanks, bro. You’re always lookin’ out for me.”

“But of course! What would you do without me?” he bellows, smiling down at you. “I hope you had fun!”

You rub your arm and glance up at Toriel. Her face is hard to read, and you can’t help but feel that maybe you screwed up. Maybe you told her too much? Maybe she thinks you’re crazy, or that you’re exaggerating? Maybe you are crazy and exaggerating. Maybe you really should have kept it all in. “It was, uhh, good. It was good.”

You all say your good-byes and wave and promise to visit again in the next few days. You let Papyrus exit first, and as you stand in the threshold, you turn back to her.

“Tori? About what you said. About letting him know?”

“Yes?”

“I’ll- I’ll think about it. I’ll try.”

“That’s all anyone can do.”

 

* * *

 

 

“I must inquire something.”

“What’s up?”

“In your story, you mentioned a child a few times and then suddenly stopped. Did something happen?”

“Oh. Uhh. Well, it’s like I said before: there was an accident. I don’t—I don’t have a son anymore.”

 

 

 


End file.
